Should I use underscores or hyphens in URLs?

A question from Ontario, Canada. Tripstar says “Underscores vs hyphens in URLs, does it make a difference? my-page vs. my_page?”

It does make a difference; I would go with dashes or hyphens if you can. If you have underscores and if things are working fine for you I wouldn’t worry about changing your architecture. A while ago I said we are looking at using underscores as separators and the reason why we typically never talk about stuff in the future is that it gives us the freedom to change our mind. In fact the people who are working on that project worked on something slightly different for scoring in the URL that was actually higher impact and a much higher win. We might still get around to that, thanks for the ping I’ll try to ask some folks on our quality triage team, hey, can we take a fresh look at this. But for the time being underscores are treated as separators, sorry dashes or hyphens are treated as separators and underscores are not. That might change in the future but that’s the way it stands right now.

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